Field
The technology described herein generally relates to systems and methods for controlling fluid processing operations associated with liquid dispense operations of fluids including samples, particularly multiple biological samples. The technology relates to automated pipetting systems to carry out various aspirate and dispense operations.
Description of the Related Art
Diagnostic testing of biological samples is instrumental in the health care industry's efforts to quickly and effectively diagnose and treat disease. Clinical laboratories that perform such diagnostic testing already receive hundreds or thousands of samples on a daily basis with an ever increasing demand. The challenge of managing such large quantities of samples has been assisted by the automation of sample analysis. Automated sample analysis is typically performed by automated analyzers that are commonly self-contained systems which perform multistep processes on the biological samples to obtain diagnostic results.
Understanding that sample flow breaks down into several key steps, it would be desirable to consider ways to automate as many of these as possible. For example, a biological sample, once extracted from a patient, must be put in a form suitable for a processing regime. In some cases, the processing regime involves DNA amplification, using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or another suitable technique, to amplify a vector of interest. Clinical laboratories also have different automated clinical analyzers performing different processing regimes. Thus, there is a need to prepare samples for diagnostic testing with a universal liquid handling system that can be easily customized and implemented in different types of analyzers.
Sample preparation is labor intensive in part because of the number of liquids, such as reagents, that are required, and the need for multiple liquid transfer (e.g., pipetting) operations. Thus, there is a need for an automated pipetting apparatus, particularly one that can operate on multiple samples in parallel.
The discussion of the background herein is included to explain the context of the inventions described herein. This is not to be taken as an admission that any of the material referred to was published, known, or part of the common general knowledge as of the priority date of any of the claims.
Throughout the description and claims of the specification the word “comprise” and variations thereof, such as “comprising” and “comprises,” is not intended to exclude other additives, components, integers or steps.